This audience is dressed in the old clothes and humiliations I in my mask, powder woman, sick of everything, my own failings most of all. Someone I heard jumped into the pit the orchestra, during the third act and landed between harp and horn, mangled like a doll at the bottom of a well. I…
Torchlight splinters in a crystal chandelier. Rebels have taken the palace. Yet, your mind sleeps safely in its skull. But, Sigmund Freud sets a fly in it. “We are made such that we can derive intense enjoyment only from contrast and little from a state of things.” Though the poli-sci major says that’s just one…
Steam lifting from the highways, ascending to the heavens beneath the misery of commute, fires below the pavement. I have become a better driver by the standards of Houston. I will hurt somebody if they deserve to be hurt. No, OK, no, but I’m an expert in menace. All this blinding steel and glass, we’ve…
When I see the bright clouds, a sky empty of moon and stars, I wonder what I am, that anyone should note me. Here there are blueberries, what should I fear? Here there is bread in thick slices, of whom should I be afraid? Under the swelling clouds, we spread our blankets. Here in this…
What separates four pounds of ground chuck elk from four pounds of ground chuck beef is two spoonfuls of black pepper, parsley, and seasoned salt. Source: the group home cookbook. When the game warden dragged a bull off the autumn highway or hauled a warm-bellied cow some poacher left to rot, he phoned us. I…
If only our children were colts, and sensible enough to be good at one thing. Running. Jumping some. Looking adorable. They would deserve our devotion. Think crepe myrtle, nudged after a brief rain. Think zealots. Think ocean waves, if we’d enough sense to give them unique personalities. Everywhere you look, willfulness. Bountiful willfulness. And these…
Osaka Hard to imagine Basho died here in a rented room above a flower shop in 1694, as I pause today on Dotonbori Street, shoppers brushing past on either side, to gaze at the giant red mechanical crab stretching its legs over the door of the Kani Doraku seafood restaurant, its eye stalks rotating…
1. Construction When the road was not a road but a flooded mouth of broken teeth husband and wife parked at the spring-swollen dam. Above a chorus of peepers they bickered the radio news unloading their haul: soft pine, tongue, groove. They shouldered the wood under a catchpenny moon. A quarter mile down they filled…
Canny has always been an Irish word to my ear, so too its cousin crafty, suggesting not only an appreciation of close-work, fine-making, handwrought artistry, but a highly evolved reliance on one’s wits to survive, stealth in the shadow of repressive institutions, “silence, exile, and cunning,” in Joyce’s admonition, ferret-sly, fox-quick, silvery, and elusive. Craft,…
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